Post-Modern Secularism: The Turkish Version*

“Militant Secularism”, as commonly referred to in the political vernacular in Turkey became the state religion of Turkey. The military, which considers itself as the guardian of the republic founded by Ataturk,against domestic and foreign enemies, often finds it necessary to interject itself into the political process. Since the defeat of communist-threat in the 80ies and the Kurdish separatists in the 90ies, the “Islamists”have been identified by the establishment as the number one enemy of the Kemalist-Secularist state, hence the target of its wrath. Owing primarily to the tarnished image resulting from the past-coups, increasingly image-conscious military sought to find alternatives to the outright overthrow of the elected governments. Hence came the “bloodless-coup”, or the “post-modern coup”-as coined by the generals- against the moderately pro-Islamic, Erbakan’s government, by the “February 28 decisions” in 1997. Since then, the generals have embarked upon a social engineering project, that includes not so overt involvement in every facet of social life from education to the judicial process, with the aim of defeating Islam, without having to resort to another coup like the one in 1960 -which resulted in the hanging of the prime minister Menderes and two cabinet ministers- and several other direct interventions thereafter.While the ostensible aims, i.e. the Westernization, modernization are met with approval of the West, thanks primarily to the advent of the information age , thus better informed public or the human rights watchdog NGOs in the West, it is becoming increasingly difficult for the Europeans to tolerate the excesses of the regime, particularly when that regime is an official candidate to the European Union, and when there exist well-defined accession conditions such as the Copenhagen Criteria, which places heavy emphasis on human rights record. The paper explores the historical, social and political dynamics at work in producing such staunch anti-Islamic paranoia of the Turkish State and analyzes external factors that have an impact on the status-quo.

History of Kemalist-Secularist State

In order to put the secularism as practiced today in Turkey in a proper context, we must look back to the near history of the young republic. After the long decline of the Ottoman Empire, culminated in several major defeats in Europe, Middle East and Caucasus, the “sick man of Europe” was struggling for it very existence after World War I. As a result, the Sultanate which was also the Caliphate, was in a weak state. In such state, Mustafa Kemal at first with the blessing by the Sultan took part in organizing a resistance against the European occupiers of Anatolia, the last vestige of the Empire. He later cashed in on the popularity and military strength, and used it to topple the Ottoman Sultanate and later the Caliphate. After the war of independence against Europeans, in 1921, he declared the official end of the Ottoman empire and the founding of the Republic of Turkey.

Ataturk did not, at first take an anti-Islamic or secularist posture during the organization of the militia. Quite the contrary, he appealed to the people’s deeply held religious beliefs in invigorating them to enlist and take part in the “holy war” against the enemies. In this effort, he benefited greatly from the religious leaders,hojas, imams and poets such as Mehmet Akif Ersoy, Ziya Gokalp and others who invoked to name of Allah often to rally people to jihad. Only after the triumph in the war of independence, he unleashed measures , to reduce the influence of Islam in government and public life, i.e. the Ataturk Revolutions.“The revolutions”, aimed at transforming the remnant of the Ottoman Empire, into a modern European state in every respect, came in a piecemeal fashion. The first “Majlis”, the Parliament, was opened with the recitations of Quran and members included many religious leaders, sheikhs and war heroes such as KazimKarabekir Pasha, his compatriot. Once Ataturk consolidated his power base, such religious or conservative figures were marginalized, including the author of the National anthem Mehmet Akif Ersoy, and the war heroes such as Marshall Fevzi Cakmak and Kazim Karabekir Pasha.

There is conflicting evidence regarding his true religious beliefs and the extent of them. However there is very little doubt that he was a rational and pragmatic man. He was well aware of the degree of religiosity in Anatolia, thus resisted outlandish suggestions such as officially changing the religion of the republic to Christianity as proposed by Recep Peker, a member of the parliament. In a speech in 1923 he said “[T]heimplementation by the state of a religious policy and to demand that state should apply, if not force, psychological pressure, as you will appreciate is not wise or logical”. In a 1930 speech he reiterated: “[S]ecularismis not only the separation of the affairs of state and religion; it is also freedom of faith and worship of all citizens. Not only is secularism not atheism, by enabling us to fight against false religiosity and sorcery, it provided opportunity to improve true religiosity”. Many other statements by him along the same line establishthat the secularism in Ataturk’s mind was not directed at wiping out all remnants of Islam from public life as practiced by his successor Inonu in the thirties and fourties, and the oligarchy of today.

After the institution of the multi-party system, leading to the Democratic Party administration, in the fifties led by Adnan Menderes, things have improved considerably for the believers in Turkey. While Menderes himself was a pro-Western politician, he was much more tolerant to religious practices in public life. Many of the Quranic and other religious schools were reopened and many restrictions on religious practices were lifted. His reign has ended with the first military coup of the Republic in 1960 culminated in the execution ofhim and two of his cabinet ministers. Some suggest that his moderate tolerance to Islam was his undoing even though the formal charges contained accusations such as cronyism, mismanagement or the like.
1960coup, in many respect was the official declaration by the military of its guardianship of the secularist-Kemalist state. It served notice to all concerned that the Democratic process in Turkey had limits and when the legislative, the judiciary and the executive are unwilling or unable to place or enforce the limits desired by the military, it would not hesitate to take matters in its own hands.

Current State

In the sixties and seventies the overt interferences of the military into political process took the form of memoranda resulting in the toppling of the elected governments, in the name of pulling the country out of the political, social economic quagmires. None however specifically targeted Islam or undertaken in the name of protecting secularism. Two Islamic-oriented political parties founded by Necmeddin Erbakan and his friends have been closed in the seventies and it is reasonable to assume that military’s feelings factored in such decisions. By and large however, neither the military nor the rest of the secularist establishment saw a realistic “Islamist” threat to the system until the early ninties, when Erbakan’s Welfare, “Refah” Party emerged as the largest party. Then the military, along with the media and powerful economic and cultural elite declared all out war against “reactionary threat”. Since then the generals have not been hesitant to express their views on political issues ranging from the education bill before the legislature to whether a deputy with a headscraf could be allowed into the parliament. These views are not merely expressed in the willing and eager establishment media, a.k.a. “Cartel”, but it is put into action in the forms of National Security Council (MGK) decisions instructing the legislature, employing the language such as “bill will be passed”. When the generals feel that the executive or the judiciary is derelict in their assigned duties, they directly interfere in both processes by various means including, e.g. setting up clandestine entities such asWestern Study Group (BCG), gathering the judges and prosecutors for “briefing sessions”, organizing conferences etc., for the purpose of “enlightening” the decision makers on the “reactionary” and separatist threats. As a result, in the name of Westernization , secularism and “cagdaslik”[ the preferred term of the Turkish Secularists, which can best be translated as “contemporaryism” for no equivalent exist in the Western Languages to the author’s knowledge], Turkey has been certified as one of the worst offenders of human rights.
The current system in Turkey can be described as a staunchly secularist oligarchy, because it is based on the imposition of the will of a small elite , formed by the military brass, and a handful of corrupt business and cultural elite in the media and academia. To wit, while this elite considers “reactionaryism”, the pseudonym for Islam, the biggest threat to the republic, only 3.95 percent of the populace agrees with them according to a recent public opinion poll. The elite knowing this, has been increasingly growing paranoid, and nervous. Having lost hopes of gaining popular support for its actions, it increases the degree of oppression, making the primary relationship between the state and the people one that is based on fear. Like Ataturk, the State and the Military are sacred entities to be protected, revered and feared from. In the midst of most recent economic disaster, and on the eve of May 1, Workers Day, cartel TV stations “inform” the public of the installment of 14 new video-cameras at major points, in Ankara. The successful protest march by the small merchants, against the corruption and the resultant unbearable economic collapse, is reported by the cartel daily, Milliyet with the headline “The Great Investigation” referring to the efforts by the military for the identification of the participants in the protest.

Since the violations of human rights by the ruling elite is most often arbitrary, the people are at a loss as to whether a certain act constitutes a violation or not. One can be prosecuted for a “crime” , e.g. a speech made years ago, even if the specifically provided statute of limitations have expired. Ask Erbakan. He was recently sentenced to one year in prison for a speech he allegedly made as a member of the parliament, a politician, in a predominantly Kurdish city, Bingol. In the speech, he allegedly uttered the words “ [w]hen starting school in the morning assembly, the children of this country began with besmele, ‘in the name of God’. You changed that and made them say ‘I am a Turk, I am forthright, I am brave, hardworking..’ On the other hand, when you say that, a Muslim child of the Kurdish origin may feel it within his right to say ‘Oh, really? In this case, I am Kurd, I am more brave, more forthright, harder-working and so on’”. These words, according to the prosecutor constituted a clear case of “creating enmity based on ethnic and religious differences” under penal code 312, article 2. The judge, the appeals court and the superior court concurred with the prosecutor. This is only one, not the most outlandish example of the extent that the arbitrary witch-hunt in the name of western secularism and modernity perpetrated upon the Turkish politicians, journalists, students and intellectuals. Any judge or an official at any level, alleged to be not though enough in “getting the reactionaries” pay the price by being reassigned to remote areas, demoted or most often fired. No segment of the government or public space is exempt from such persecution. The most egregious abuses however takes place in the education from elementary to higher. The government placed severe restrictions through legislation and through cabinet decrees in the force of law, to the Islamic formal or informal education, by arbitrary measures such as denying government service or higher education to the graduates of Imam-Hatips (high schools that offer religious education inaddition to secular curriculum) , closing Quranic schools, banning religious gatherings outside of prayer time in the mosques, shutting down religious foundations, including those which are purely charitable organizations. It is well documented by the Western human rights groups and government agencies that the Ecevit Government, which miserably failed in delivering aid to the victims of the earthquake and plundered the funds provided by the world, acted very quickly in stopping the aid to the victims by the “reactionaries”, i.e. Islamic -oriented aid organizations, by confiscating their aid, freezing their bank-funds and declaring them illegal, all for the purpose of assuring that “Islamists” would not gain popularity among the people. This mentality is illustrated by the triumphant declaration the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Kivrikoglu, in the aftermath of the earthquake in which he said “I noticed that the Derince Mayoralty [Virtue Party] was running a very effective soup kitchen. I ordered an investigation and found out that it was run by the former officers we expelled from the military”.

Why?

The examples such as the ones above are numerous and reported by Turkish and international human rights organizations. The readers may visit the web-site of Mazlum-Der (www.mazlumder.org) for further information. What is absent in the discussion is generaly “why”s of this lunacy masquerading as the defence of “secularism” or “contemporaryism”. That is primarily because no meaningful public discourse or dialog takes place on the issues in such a witch-hunting environment. The labeling by the elite, the military and the blow-horn, cartel media as the “reactionary” or even “suspected reactionary” is a kiss of death for any intellectual, academics or journalist. You are persecuted, dehumanized, marginalized. No one dares to defend himself or herself on the grounds that he or she is entitled to hold those views or beliefs for such speech or lifestyle is protected under the constitution , laws and international conventions. The defense, invariably is one of “I am Kemalist, secularist too.. and here is the evidence..”. Such defense did not help very many, including the Refah Party. Since the elite in its infinite wisdom, decided that the “reactionaries”are not worthy of being engaged in an intelligent dialog and do not have the power to force a debate, they did not even develop skills needed to articulate justifications for their position. The most coherent argument the intellectual ones among them make can be summarized as: We want Western Style Democracy, however we have “special circumstances”. No Democracy can allow a movement bent on destroying the Democratic system itself, to flourish. Western Democracies can allow freedom of thought , speech , religion because they are not threatened by such harmful ideas and movements. Once we eliminate such threats, we will grant all the freedoms the Westerners have. “We Kill the snake when it is young. Little Islam leads to more Islam, which we can not tolerate. See what happened to Iran and Afghanistan! They however have not to date offered a definition of the terms used to label thus persecute others, such as “reactionary”, “backward”, “fundamentalist”,“anti-secularist”. They stop there and offer no further argument as to why they think the “Islamists”of Turkey are on a course to pattern a system after those of Afghanistan or Iran, or what act of totalitarianism or religous oppression by the Erbakan government or the Virtue-Party controlled municipalities they can point to, to justify such fears. It gains importance in light of the fact that these labels alone are found sufficient by the administrators and the judges for punitive actions against individuals and organizations. Any female student, or government employee who wears a scarf is considered to do so for the sole purpose of “exploiting Islam for political gain” or doing so as a symbol of “political Islam”, and not because of religious beliefs. No argument to the contrary is to be listened or no argument is produced as to even if it is assumed to be so, why it is not covered by the constitutionally guaranteed “freedom of expression”. They know better and their knowledge is the evidence.
An environment where the powerful declares that there is nothing to be discussed for the discussions lead to legitimizing the reactionaries, and that there are only internal enemies to be defeated at any cost, is naturally not conducive to a meaningful discourse. In the absence of their own intelligent articulation of the true reasons or justification for this behavior, irreconcilable with westernization, or democracy or secularism, the observer is left to work on the evidence to psychoanalyze the perpetrators.

The observers of the recent developments in Turkey cannot escape the sinister connection between the government corruption and the persecution of Muslims. While the ostensible aims of the overthrow of the Erbakan government in 1997 was to crush political Islam, a few other events point that the sole reason was not ideologic. Prior to the Erbakan, the government owned corporations (KIT) were borrowing domestically from a handful of powerful businessmen at exorbitant rates while other KIT’s had funds sitting in the banks owned by the same powerful elite and earning very low rates. According to a Harvard, and Columbia Univ. Educated economist, Dr. Cuneyt Ulsever, 91% of the profitability of the 500 largest industrial concerns were derived from short term government securities at very high interest rates. Erbakan, largely ended this windfall for the elite, by establishing a new borrowing scheme called “pool-system”. According to this, the KIT’s kept their money in the government coffers, i.e. a “pool” instead of the banks and borrowed from the same pool when they needed funds. This alone according to some estimates saved 9 billion dollars in one year, which was passed on to the government-employees as salary increases. In addition, even when the whole establishment was in collusion to topple the government of Erbakan, there has been no accusation of corruption to date against his administration. It is not surprising therefore that most of the powerful Cartel barons and corrupt businessman were the first ones to cry “reactionary” when their corrupt windfalls were cut out. According to an audit by Price- Waterhouse, 36% of the Turkish GNP is lost to corruption today. Corruption is certified to be the main reason for the worst economic collapse of the century that Turkey is experiencing today and international rescuers such as IMF and World-Bank are asking for guarantees against similar corruption as condition for future loans. When there is no more money left to plunder, these champions of secularism started to cannibalize each other. Dozens of billionaires, including many retired generals, media barons, close relatives of former president Demirel are awaiting trial for corruption, embezzlement, and misallocation. On the other hand, the only Islamists in jail are there because of their views and beliefs, none for corruption. This is another dimension of “Islamist-hunt” in Turkey. Clean government, moral society is seen harmful to the well-being of some secularists. It must be the“post-modern secularism” following the “post-modern coup” as coined by one of the generals involved, general Ozkasnak. The corruption-connection is the sole distinction between the modern-secularism from the post-modern one. At first it was those who felt that Islam was an impediment in the way of life they aspired, later they are joined by those who felt that Islam was harmful to their racket.

The European Connection

While the ostensible aims, i.e. the westernization, modernization are met with approval of the West, thanks primarily to the advent of the information age , thus better informed public or the human rights watchdog NGOs in the West, it is becoming increasingly difficult for the Europeans to tolerate the excesses of the regime, particularly when that regime is an official candidate to the European Union, and when there exist well-defined accession conditions such as the Copenhagen Criteria, which places heavy emphasis on human rights record. So far the Europeans turned a deaf ear to the plight of the Muslims of Turkey. That can be attributed to the fact that muslim victims either considered it beneath their dignity or were not equipped with wherewithal to take their case to the European forums. The only human rights abuses in Turkey that Europeans recognized were the ones against Kurdish separatists, and their organization PKK. This lack of concern for one large segment of the society, i.e. the victims of the religious persecution, but extraordinary interest in the abuses against an ethnic minority lead many Turks to conclude that the Europeans do not have the purest humanitarian motives at heart when they pressure Turkey on Kurdish human rights but it is merely a profitable political tool to be used to weaken an eternal enemy, i.e. the crusader mentality rather than human rights is at play. Many decisions sympathetic to the Kurdish plight have been rendered by the European Court for human Rights (ECHR) but none so far that shows even an acknowledgment of the Muslim oppression. In a recent decision in a case filed by a female student victim of the “headscarf oppression” ECHR judges opined that “by choosing the secular education you agreed to comply with its dress-code thus forfeited the right to dress according to your religion”. This however ignores several facts: First, there are no “religious”schools in Turkey; all schools are “secular”, including the private schools and thus under the jurisdiction of the government. A female cannot even receive a driving course completion certificate from a private school, with a picture bearing scarf. Thus a student “choosing” education is choosing secular education. Second, there is no law prohibiting the wearing of the headscarves in any school or in any government office. It is purely, the executive action by the government and the school administrators. And thirdly, even if such restrictions existed in Turkish constitution or laws, is it not self-evident that such laws would violate international conventions such as Helsinki Declaration that Turkey is signatory to? Nonetheless this travesty of justice by the ECHR gave much needed legtimation of the oppression by the Oligarchy against faithful and emboldened them to increase the intensity and the breadth of the abuse. Now they could say “we are affirmed by the Europeans thus vindicated”.

The Middle-Eastern Connection.

Another important reason why Turkey gets a free-pass vis-a-vis the oppression of the Muslims is the Israeli-connection. For the last decade, Turkey seems to have subcontracted its foreign policy to the Jews in the West, in particular in USA. Every issue from Armenian genocide claims to IMF loans, is first pleaded with the Jewish groups. It became a standard protocol for every Turkish government official, from prime minister to president to address at least one Jewish Group during every visit to USA, but never a Muslim group. To reciprocate, US Jewish Groups often visit Turkey to discuss the issues pertaining the relationship between Turkey and Israel, and other Middle-Eastern countries. Lobbying for Turkish interests are invariably contracted to Jewish owned lobbying firms such as those run by Richard Perle and Steven Solarz. It is not clear what benefits Turkey obtained in exchange for distancing itself from even the moderate Muslim countries such as Egypt and Pakistan, giving lucrative weapons contracts, and airspace to the Israeli Fighter-planes for “training flights” along the Iraqi and Iranian borders. Since Turkey is listed among the first countries , in “lack of transparency”, it is impossible for the interlocutor to know the exact nature of the concessions made. However many suspect that the European and American indifference to the abuse against Muslims, may be helped by Jewish “lobbying activities on behalf of Turkey “.

Conclusion

In this age of information technology and globalization, it is not possible to maintain a fascist regime while having others inside or outside believe it is something else, such as secular-democracy. While theWestern governments, including US, prodded by Israel, might find it “in our national interest” to remain silent in the face of such abuses, such “national interest” does not come cheap, for when such allies go bankrupt, as a result of corruption they come knocking the door for bail-outs. Turkish people, the children of multi-cultural Ottomans, are overwhelmingly tolerant, vis-a-vis the religion, ethnic differences, and enlightened. It is the author’s humble belief that the West’s national or common interests would be better served by forging alliances with the people of the Islamic world , including those in Turkey. The monarchs, the oligarches the tyrants come and go, but people remain. It is high time that “morally correct” policies become “politically correct ones” and thus “our national interest”.

*Presented at the second Annual Confrerence of Center For the Study of Islam and Demoracy (CSID: Islam, Demoracy and the Secularist State in the Post-Modern Era, Washington, DC (April 7, 2001)